This is true for most Apple protocols in my experience. I’m supposed to be able to control my Homepod from my watch with a tap but it never works. Sometimes I can’t use the Homepod for minutes until it shows up. iMessage regularly fails to show the blue name for contacts, FaceTime is randomly unavailable for certain contacts, Airpods randomly disconnect, Airdrop rarely works. Tethering is also kind of spotty. The watch Walkie-Talkie function is terrible, dropping bits of the message. How they even implemented a working TCP/IP stack is beyond me. Lo and behold the most reliable “protocol” is HomeKit, but even that is randomly unable to persist name changes.

I’ve encountered many of these as well and have always assumed this was somehow the result of trying to make everything “just work”, wherein providing detailed user feedback or error messages would be some kind of admission that it hadn’t “just worked”.

It either "just works" or "just doesn't work"

I've seen one of the Bluetooth guys from Google Glass say that it's perfectly normal in the industry to silently restart the Bluetooth stack before every connection attempt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26647981

I guess Apple should adopt that too, since toggling Airplane mode on and off is the usual fix for issues with services layered on top of Bluetooth?

Heh “should”

My experience suggests that this is true for most Apple products. It either works the way Apple has decided it should work, or it fails silently and mysteriously.

I find a lot of the grief with these protocols is driven by which wifi router is in use. When using the old Apple wifi routers I never had trouble with homekit, airdrop, handoff, airplay or any of the zeroconfig network stuff: as soon as I switched to other brands the issues would pop up (including ones that oddly seem to persist even after disconnecting from wifi - but then disappear when using a different user account on the same machine).

Because of this I feel Apple could do a hugely better job in all of their wireless protocols, as it stands the only truly stable networking appears to be between two iphones.

Specifically with Homekit, a wired Apple TV and good quality home networking equipment with wired access points makes a world of difference. I use Aruba Instant On, but I have had good experiences with Orbi at higher prices and Linksys Velop at the lower end from Costco. Also, if you have a lot of Homekit stuff, it is best to use devices that have their own Zwave or Zigbee or whatever hubs that are then connected via ethernet into your network, to cut down on how much chit chat is flying around on WiFi, especially from cheaper quality homekit devices.

I am overall unimpressed with the consistency of wireless technologies, especially since Apple no longer makes the equipment that provides the backbone (the router/access points). You usually have no idea what quality radios and programming various wireless devices are equipped with, so it is just a crapshoot when dealing with it.

I actually have the exact opposite experience. I have tried multiple different brands, all of which work JUST FINE with any other device, Android, internet connected devices, even my iPhones will work in every single room of my house.

Literally nothing I can do can make every HomePod on my network “just work”.

I would pay literally twice the amount of money for a HomePod with a fucking Ethernet port. Siri itself works amazingly well with it: when it can communicate.

The dream is to be able to wirelessly and effortlessly play music throughout my home, but I’m about to just give the fucking HomePods away and just wire speakers to every room in the house, even if it does cost more, it’ll actually fucking WORK.

Yes, it would be much nicer if HomePods had a wired option.

I bought 4 HomePods and they are easily the buggiest product I’ve bought non 30 years of buying almost everything Apple makes. Disgusting.

Many "just works" things on the local network start failing for me when I'm using a VPN. Maybe check whether that's the reason. But yes, generally the reliability is so-so. Also, the feature to use Apple Watch to unlock the Mac or iPhone works mostly, at best.

I don’t use a VPN and I don’t think it’s my network because I don’t have any problems with “old” protocols (UPNP, samba, RDP/VNC, SSH, everything on top of HTTP). I wonder what Apple’s protocols do that makes them so error prone. If it was one or two of those I’d say it’s a bad department but the amount of errors suggests a deeper problem in the way Apple develops these things.

Also my experience.. Super unreliable. It works, as long as you don't touch your phone/laptop, and don't have any network hickups.

Still, it's the only thing that works

When I was traveling from Sharm El Sheikh through Sinai to Israel in the bus I’ve transferred 40GB of photos and videos to my friends on iPhone 6S. Imagine this on Android 5 years ago - they (Google) only managed to copy AirDrop with same functionality (wifi + bluetooh) only in 2020 with Nearby Share.

Not sure if that's a real question, how you would have copied files 5+ years ago between phones? Support for USB host mode was introduced with Android 4, released in 2011, but would have required the use of an OTG cable so that would likely not have been an option.

Popular Android file managers at the time had file transfer capabilities so that was probably the quickest. The advantage is that they used normal file transfer protocols which were available everywhere so the other party didn't require any special support.

However a decade ago all phones had SD cards, because their internal memory storage was so small so you needed them should you wish to use the camera beyond any trivial amount. So just copying that way would probably have been what most people did.

Yes - similar story… I had to use it at airport security in south east asia when I needed my hotel booking to get through… my colleague was able to airdrop it to me even though we had no cell or wifi connectivity

Samsung phones have had this feature for years. So if you had the top of the line androids, you would have been able to do the same thing you did with your Iphones. I see many people make the mistake of comparing $1000 Iphones to the cheapest $200 android phones and use that as evidence of Iphone superiority. I guess we have Apple's marketing and brand to thank for that.

Never heard of such features on Android or Samsung despite my Android friends use them whole life and AirDrop was one of the reasons some of them switched to iPhones. There were some things where you needed to put smartphones back to back and it worked probably in one of 100 times but nothing like AirDrop. That’s why Google failed with wifi direct and other childish approaches.

And iPhones with AirDrop cost like 100 usd for 5s

> Never heard of such features on Android or Samsung

S beam used to exist in Galaxy S4, which launched in 2013. It used NFC and peer to peer wifi to transfer files at high speeds.

Why not just use a cable and copy the files? Oh wait you can't do that on an iPhone. You don't have the freedom to.

Of course you can use a cable, but they are unreliable. They tend to break, corrode, get dirty, disappear, have incomparable ends(one side USB-A, the other one micro USB, lightning - whatever) that one of the devices don't accept.

They are also bulky and the transfer speeds are slow. Airdrop can transfer gigabytes of data in minutes, which is only possible with the latest wired interfaces that only the newest devices have and not all support file transfers.

iPhones tend to last 3-5 years or even more and iPhones from different generations can transfer each other files through AirDrop. Not everyone has the money to update their phone each year and many who can update think it's wasteful to do so that they can use the latest wired file transfer method.

You recommend buying 5-10m cable and connect people on different seats in the bus/plane/pool/whatever? Which century is this?

Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!

Uh, I'm on Android ans I use Syncthing, not a câble.

" Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!"

...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket.

I would love to see this caricature of ios users, what dongle do you imagine we carry and what purpose does said dongle serve?

I was mostly thinking about Macs at the time I made the joke, because very often an iOS user is also a Mac user. Where I work, Mac users always have to carry around dongles.

I think it is the other way around -- almost always a Mac user will be an iOS user, but there are plenty of iPhone users without Macs. At least in the US. iPhones seem to be around 50%-ish of sales in recent years, while Macs are not as popular, somewhere around 15%.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/13/mac-market-share-q2-2021/

https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-iphone-record-sales-us...

Of course, there are lots of competing estimates for this sort of thing, but the numbers are so far apart that I don't think it matters too much.

Personally, I have an iPhone because I'm completely uninterested in cellphones and just want something that I don't have to think about too much/will be supported for a while. My computers all run Linux, because computers are cool, and fun to tinker with. Maybe someone who grew up in the era where cellphones weren't so useless will have a different perspective, though.

WRT dongles -- I dunno. Some of the popular Macbook models don't have HDMI ports, right? That seems pretty annoying. But my ZenBook lacks a headphone jack! The moral of the story is I guess that OEMs just want to fill our pockets with dongles. Or maybe selling replacement dongles is the solution to the post Moore's law era, since we don't have to replace our PCs anymore.

That makes sense, thanks for the info. Where I work there are lots Mac users, so the Venn diagram of iPhone users who use a PC isn't as noticeable. :D

Really depends. Our company is entirely Mac. Everything “just works” wirelessly. Like AirPlay for conference rooms, my external monitor is USB-C, etc. No dongles necessary. It’s only when going to other clients where I need to carry around dongles because they don’t support AirPlay or their Wifi network requires several days advanced notice and a urine test before you can get access.

ah I see. with regard to Macs, I skipped from the 2015 macbook model to the 2021 macbook model and I probably would have held out longer and therefore never needed a dongle, but I digress.

back to iOS. no dongles for me there either. my headphones have been wireless for almost a decade, and the charging ports are pretty ubiquitous.

“ ...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket”

No, just happy to see you

I thought it multiplexed over Wifi, Wifi Direct and bluetooth? So much for that.

> I also wonder, why this type of file transfer isn't the industry standart.

I would assume because it's technically complicated, using multiple protocols under the hood. That's fine if you control all the hardware on every supported device, but not great for building interoperability.

Bluetooth file transfer is a standard that works, but it's slooooooooow!

A major failure point for me is devices simply not showing up as available.

I’ve got an MBP that doesn’t show up, and never has, but it sees the rest. Any other macbook or iphone I’ve tried AirDrop with just works, but not my MBP.

I've had trouble with airdrop from phone to mbp when the mbp was on VPN. I don't know how airdrop works but I'm guessing the fact the VPN takes over DNS (and blocks requests to all other nameservers) has something to do with it.

Who knows though. Apple's engineers love writing software that doesn't produce useful logs.

They do love clogging the logs with useless messages, though, as anyone who’s opened Console can testify.

I've had similar experiences.

iOS devices always show up, no problem.

Macs at home only do occasionally. Until the latest macOS update, my MacBook Pro would only show up if I opened an AirDrop Finder window.

But when I was in the office, my work group of about 15 people would AirDrop files back-and-forth to one another all day long, without a hiccup.

It is a mysterious beast.

> Does anyone knows how to debug it?

Toggle Airplane mode on and off.

Bluetooth is problematic on every platform. Restarting it is the usual fix.

   sudo killall bluetoothd

This fixes if the error is on the Mac side. On iOS you have to reboot the device.

Toggling bt/airplane mode can work for iOS instead

The furthest I got was, on macOS, I restarted the daemon with `sudo launchctl stop com.apple.sharingd` followed by start. This however didn't fix it for my case, and I was not able to find any deeper debugging steps on my iPhone. Perhaps rebooting the phone would have helped.

It‘s brilliant until a pair of devices enters a state where the target does not receive airdrop notifications anymore, while the source is stuck on „waiting“, which can only be resolved by restarting the devices.

When AirDrop doesn’t work I just turn Bluetooth off and on on the device. That’s usually enough.

Sometimes it is for me, sometimes it isn‘t. It fails up to 25% of times.

Console.app will give you all the error messages you ever wanted. And more.